Search

Why I Don’t Use Adblockers

I’ve had some whiskey, and I’ve been thinkin’. So let’s talk about something dear to me.

A couple years back, I wrote a “browser-based multiplayer role-playing game” called Nexus War. Don’t go looking for it on Wikipedia; the article was deleted (again) a couple weeks ago for being “non notable”.

(Fuck you for that, by the way. I play lots of “free to play” games from time to time to see what they do, and so many of them integrate gameplay elements that I fucking invented so fuck off with your entire “not notable” shit. The game was mentioned in fucking Playboy but whatever I guess people who don’t know dick about the subject at hand know more than me.)

Anyways.

Nexus War was fun for me to build. It started as a small hobbyist thing that my friends could play and that was cool. That was my only reason for doing it for a long, long time. Later, it got popular and it started requiring Real Cash Money to manage.

I never designed the game with the intent to make money and it showed. Any monetization principles were clearly bolted on after-the-fact.

After a time, the output for the game overran the input for the game and I had to kill it.

Those of you who have been in the situation where you had to murder your own children may understand the emotions I dealt with in this.

Given that I am a communist bastard at heart, playing the game was free. Everyone could play. You got to have three characters for free and that ended up to anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes a day that you could play. For free.

I really only ever wanted to break even.

If you wanted to play more than a half hour, you could buy “character slots” at a one-time cost of about five bucks per slot. That gave you an additional dude that you could have running around. But buying slots didn’t create any advantage for you: you still couldn’t work your characters in tandem, nor could you “slip time” to other guys. So a one-time drop of five bones gave you another 10 minutes a day for the life of the game.

Later, I added the ability to buy small tokens. These things were not game-affecting; they were the equivalent of “cool clothes”. 25 cents and you could have a rare type of clothing. That sort of thing. It was a credits system, where one US cent equalled 1 credit.

I also ran ads in sidebars and such not. Mostly text ads, but some were images.

At it’s peak, Nexus War had 40,000 unique players at a time (80,000 over its life). Games like this have a rotational user-base. The lifecycle of a player is about 3 to 4 months, after which they move on. I guess it was costing me about 700 dollars a month to run on multiple servers, before the entire “cloud computing” thing happened. I was coding this in my spare time.

There was exactly one month that I made a profit and two months that I broke even. The ad revenue was key, actually. The introduction of ads pushed me into the green for the initial 30 days I had them turned on.

You cannot imagine my emotions at this. I could do this! I could continue running the game and not compromise any of my principles. Holy smokes, I was in the green.

Then someone made a post on the game forums about how to best disable the ads using various adblocker techniques.

I briefly thought about killing the post. I could do it. No one would really complain. But I would be censoring someone and I couldn’t abide that. They weren’t being racist or homophobic or any other kind of hateful. I had to let it go. So I did.

And the advertising revenue halved itself in the next month. And yet again in the month after, with no appreciable loss in players.

At that point I was deep in the red. It continued to get worse, until my ad revenue checks were along the lines of “ten dollars”. The playerbase hadn’t really decreased, either.

I ran the game at a heavy loss for another eight months before I had to close it. I just couldn’t do it anymore.

So.

Every time I visit a site and it throws an advertisement at me? I know what that means. And I don’t block it. I reckon there’s somebody on the other side of that http request who is hoping that my visit will earn him 1/100th of a penny.

Remember that when you decide that you love something and want to kill its ability to make money.

Comments (22)

You also allowed people to pay money to turn off the ads (which I did, I think… I remember spending a little bit of my summer house-painting money on NW, and I don’t regret a single cent of it), but I never knew that many people adblocked NW. Wow.

I’m sorry. Nexus war was a really fun part of my past and watching it die was a very painful event for me (obviously this was a lot harder for you). I remember than you even told us once how adblock was fucking ad revenue up which endangered the game, I filtered NW from adblock then. I could’ve sworn that most people also filtered it, because nobody wanted the game to die. I’m not going to argue about that, since the decreasement in revenue you had speaks for itself, but learning this is saddening.

On an unrelated note, you mentioned in your twitter that anonymity killed the game, why didn’t you say anything specifically about that in the article?

The entire TOR system was really bad. Lots and lots of people used it to anonymously duck the “play three for free” aspect. I couldn’t track the proxies and it became cost-effective to let people screw me on that.

Eugene, that time has passed. The game might be considered quaint now, to be honest. I’m fine with that. This was a rant triggered by something someone said to me this evening, nothing more, nothing less.

Quaint perhaps, but I’m one of those guys who loves to play old games. Doom is ridiculously old, but I still take the time to sit down and paint the walls with Imp brains. It saddens me that I can’t still swim the dust rivers of Nifleheim forever.

I haven’t finished 95% of the games, I have bought, but I did earn the door destroy and repair badges on my 3 characters. I loved that game. For what it’s worth I paid to have the ads removed. I hope the characters are backed up somewhere because number 1 on my list of ways to spend winning the lottery is buying Nexuswar from you and starting it up again. Even if it isn’t backed up; I took screenshots of my boys so I could replay them.

I think society is to blame for things like this. I can’t help but be reminded of a scene from Futurama where Fry lists off all the things advertising was placed on in the 20th century. People are bombarded with advertising everwhere they go now. You can’t walk down the street, turn on your TV or turn on your radio without having ads pushed at you. I’ll come clean and say that i’m an ad blocker, I have the Firefox extention and it’s always enabled. It was when I played Nexus War and if it ever comes back, it will be again. My reasoning? I will never click ads. I don’t trust the internet and I never will. I will never buy anything from an online ad and i’m very firm on that. Seeing as the ads work on a per click/purchase basis, it defeats the point of them being there so I remove them. Unfortunately due to this, sites like Nexus War will suffer. As much as I loved NW for the two years I played I will not change my attitude toward ads, and that goes for any website.

Yes, but not all ads work on a per click basis. Quite a few ads nowadays work on a “per impression”, ie. how many people just have them load on their screen. Adblock destroys the revenue from these especially. Most ad companies now do both ways. You get a micro amount for a per impression and a slightly larger amount for a per click.

It made me glad to read this post and realize that I was in the minority in everything. I never had the money to buy credits, but I never used an adblocker (I even tried one of the advertised games where you had to mix DNA to create beasts or something, but it was pretty awful compared to NW), and I certainly played for more than 3 months (pretty much most of high school and a little bit of college). It broke my heart when the game ended, although I still have wonderful memories of the Elder Powers roaming those last few weeks and how much fun everyone had just following them around.

Hi Jorm
Loved the game, although I only got my wings in the last day or so. You, Kevin and a handful of other developers have lead the way for many other games. Your ideas and inspiration will live on. Funny to think that the popularity actually killed the beast in the end. You said you wanted to make a community, that community lives on in other games I’ve played. Maybe the ads would have been a small price to pay in the end.

Hi.
You have no idea how much this resonates with me. I didn’t love my project like you seemed to love yours, but I wanted to do best by my users and facilitate something on the web, though obviously controversial. The real crush is seeing a site that is so popular that the bw and hosting bill are astronomical. Incredible amounts of traffic, insanely popular, but unable to pay for itself. It can really cut to the bone.

I’ve never used any kind of adblocker. I fully understand and appreciate the things society provides at a non cash price. TV, radio, newspapers, 99% of web content – all supplemented or supported with ad revenue. I really just don’t mind advertising and I am always aware of what it allows me to have for free.

The lesson I learned: There is no money in non-money ventures. If you want to do something, charge people for it. If you don’t, they think it’s worth nothing and treat it as such.